In a recent issue Marv Dealy, of Throckmorten Enterprises asked about the wisdom of repeatedly resubmitting your site to the search engines. We received conflicting responses from two top SEO specialists. Here’s a response from Dan Thies, which offers some surprising advice, and tips the scales towards NOT resubmitting your site. In fact, Dan advises that you don’t submit your site at all!
Here’s Dan Thies: My two cents here, based on practical experience. Not only do I not REsubmit, I don’t submit in the first place, at least not to the “major” search engines (AllTheWeb/FAST, Altavista, Google, Inktomi). Search engines regularly find and crawl websites that have enough external links pointingto them. Submission doesn’t speed things up any more; in fact it seems to slow them down.
When I launch a site, I arrange link partnerships well in advance, and we’re usually getting crawled by all the major search engines within a week of the links going up, with multiple pages included at their next database update.
Compared to sites we’ve tried to work with “after the fact,” it’s not even close – they usually take weeks to get crawled after being submitted, and it can take a few months for Google to list a new site that doesn’t have substantial incoming links on day one.
Inclusion (getting crawled does not mean you’re listed yet) also happens faster when we focus on links instead of submissions.
We work on links, not just to the home page of the site, but to major internal pages as well. For example, if we have 5 sections, the home page for each section also gets some external links. This encourages the search engines to do a deeper crawl – getting more pages indexed means more traffic.
I’m not the only one who feels this way. Doug Heil, whose SEO service’s website is ranked in the top ten on all the major search engines, recently mentioned in his forums that he stopped doing submissions a long time ago. It took a real leap of faith to try this the first time with my own site, but it worked. We got our first hit from Google just 3 weeks after launch.”
Dan Thies is a well-known writer and teacher on search engine marketing. He offers consulting, training, and coaching for webmasters, business owners, SEO/SEM consultants, and other marketing professionals through his company, SEO Research Labs. His next online class will be a link building clinic beginning March 22
